Recruiting superstars: A how to guide to hiring the best staff

Start by assessing the profile of your existing employees which is done by grouping them into categories – the A’s are the high achievers who will drive your business forward, the B’s are doing ok but have room for improvement while the C’s are the plodders. We have put together the following guide, used in our own organisation, which will help you identify the A’s and create a workforce of superstars.

Criteria 1

Criteria 1 is about defining the personality and attitude of the people that you want to employ. Education is a good starting point and finding out how they did in their GCCE’s and even their degree will reveal how committed they are. Also, what do they do outside of work? ‘A’ players have loads of stuff going on outside of work, they are the go-getters and the people you want.

Criteria 2

The best staff are smart and aware of what’s going on around them. They are curious and ask lots of questions and they are keen to be measured, they like targets and want to know the impact of what they’re doing within the organisation. These are the people you need to look out for.

Read more about the recruitment space:

• Jobvite, the recruitment platform used by Twitter and Starbucks, opens UK office to tackle Europe
• Government plans to reform recruitment legislation and stop UK firms hiring only overseas workers
• How Hiring Hub is changing the recruitment process for British SMEs

The job advert

Getting the right people to apply for the job is important and to ensure that you don’t miss out on the best talent it’s worth continually running a range of different job ads. Don’t create clever job titles as they can be confusing and put people off.

Make sure that the ad sells the business, be honest and talk about the culture. You only want people that want to work in your culture. To find out who has actually read the ad why not have a link to a video which asks a question that you bring up at the interview.

X-Factor recruitment process

All shortlisted candidates are then invited to an interview which takes place at 7.30am at a chosen location. The timing of the interview often puts people off and several drop out at this point. On arrival, a picture is taken of each candidate and they are kept in a holding area until 7.30am at which point the doors are closed and latecomers are not welcome.

In order to progress to the next stage, we ask them to tell us one thing they have learnt about our business before coming to the interview. Often a few people are lost at this stage due to lack of research as they weren’t curious enough.

Find out why Botterill gives the same book to all staff during induction.

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